HS: But how can you tell what the audience is like if you
are not very directly interacting with them? How can
you tell what the range of intelligence is? I was
wondering all the time during the performance what kind
of audience you were pitching it at.
DA: You don't know what it is but you feel it out--at the
beginning of a piece I have a tendency to be fairly
exploratory, it doesn't start taking shape right away.
There is a kind of prelude, you run a few scales to see
how they work for you but also whether people find them
intelligible, which may not mean that you will abandon
them. But you get a sense from body language whether
people are with you or not with you and there are ways
of playing it that are so completely intuitive I don't
even know how I do it. That is I spend a fair amount
of time circling the material before plunging in, to
achieve a readiness of mind and also a kind of tuning
relationship--it's like tuning an instrument as a
prologue. In other words in standard orchestral
situations they tune because they have got to reach a
particular pitch, but I have freedom of tuning because
no one tells me whether I need just tempered or equal
tuning.
--from an interview with david antin
8 Sep 2010 / 1 note / david antin talk poems tuning
now youre standing somewhere and im
standing somewhere in semantic space and theyre not the
same place because i find it hard to imagine us all or any of us
standing in precisely the same place even in semantic space
now supposing from where im standing "blue" looks pretty
close to abstract and from where youre standing it looks
pretty close to concrete i can imagine your position and you
can imagine mine how can we each get to imagine the others
position how come i can imagine your position as well
as mine? how do you get to imagine my position as well as
yours?
--from david antins "tuning"
8 Sep 2010 / 3 notes / david antin talk poems tuning
i did my english thesis on david antin’s talk poetry in 1997 and saw antin speak for the first time last year. so awesome.
